On Sat, 28 Jan 2006 09:18:22 +0300, "Oleg A. Paraschenko" <olpa at bitplant.de> wrote:
> The question is very interesting. I think that reverse enginieering of >binary formats is quite a common practice. At least, I heard that first >version of MS Word read Word Perfect files, MS Excel -- Lotus files, etc. Um, that was before DMCA was enacted. And I was one of the chanting demonstrators outside Adobe's San Jose HQ, who convinced them to stop persecuting Dmitri. ;-) Got the t-shirt to prove it (it was only given to demonstrators). But for Frame, it's way less interesting, because there really isn't anything in the .fm that's not in MIF, except for trouble. MIF is guaranteed back-compatible; .fm is guaranteed to change with every version, and is never back compatible. Using MIF is a no-brainer. We've only had one customer who was getting .fm files from a vendor and didn't have FM themselves; we told them to buy a copy. <g> They could afford it; they were a state government agency. You might think running in a build environment would be a reason. But then look at our free runfm utility, which does that job using COM to run a copy of Frame remotely. I don't see any other need for processing .fm files... -- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc. <jeremy at omsys.com> http://www.omsys.com/
